Image Studies: A Practical Approach
by Sunil Manghani
(Routledge, in preparation, due 2011)
The making of images, whether it is copying paintings or simply learning the basics of digital video editing, needs to be practiced in the same seminar rooms where historical and interpretive work takes place. Only then will it become apparent just how difficult it is to knit the two kinds of experience together and how tremendously important it is to try; otherwise, entire image-making practices will remain partly or wholly inaccessible to historical understanding. And what is worse, visual theory will be able to consolidate the notion that study is sufficient to the understanding of images, and independent of actual making.
- James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (Routledge, 2003, p.158-9)
Image Studies aims to be a practical textbook of visual studies, aimed at undergraduate students on a variety of theoretical degree programmes within the arts and humanities. Building on the edited collection, Images: A Reader, which offers a selection of key readings on the image from Plato through to the present, and a host of key books on visual culture, the idea behind Image Studies is to complement these books with a practical-based study guide. It provides both explicit reference to existing critical materials as well as active tasks and strategies to bring the academic study of visual culture into direct contact with practical aspects of visual culture and image-making.
The quote above from James Elkins’ introduction to visual culture relates to a decade of experience in teaching ‘drawing and painting to a large number of graduate students who had not picked up a charcoal since elementary school’. As Elkins explains, ‘[t]he idea was partly to critique certain assumptions that are made about differences between art history and studio practice,’ but more significantly, ‘the classes also revealed a surprising new kind of visual competence. Students in those classes copied a number of works … and some of the insights that emerged are not replicable in classrooms where images are not produced’. In effect Elkins presents an important manifesto for the development of visual studies. And what underpins his work is the desire for visual studies to be made more ‘difficult’, by which he means ‘a visual studies that is denser with theories and strategies, more reflective about its own history, warier of existing visual theories, more attentive to neighbouring and distant disciplines, more vigilant about its own sense of visuality, less predictable in its politics, and less routine in its choice of subjects’.
Image Studies seeks to address the various concerns raised by Elkins with a view to further extending how visual studies is taught and studied. Thus, aiming to go beyond an all too often static approach to image analysis which persists in teaching today, the book seeks to combine all the usual reference points, but with more recent scholarship to give dynamic, creative and critically informed ‘ways of seeing’ relevant to contemporary visual culture.
Proposed Contents
(Thoughts and suggestions most welcome…)
Introduction: Adventures in Image Analysis
PART ONE: THEORY & PRACTICE
Chapter 1: Approaches to Images Studies
PART TWO: BEYOND TEXT
Chapter 2: Painting & Drawing
Chapter 3: Image & Text
PART THREE: LENS-BASED MEDIA
Chapter 4: Photography & Digital Imaging
Chapter 5: The Moving Image
PART FOUR: IMAGE CULTURES
Chapter 6: Consumer Culture & Identity
Chapter 7: Scientific Imaging
Chapter 8: Environmental Images
Conclusion: Image-Makers
Appendix 1: Manipulating Images
Appendix 2: Image Research and Permissions
